OK, so as the title says, I’ve been trying to find out whether SFP sellers are allowed to use Tracked48 again. Since they taken it away a good few months ago, it’s cost us a fortune having to upgrade orders to Tracked 24.

I read on these forums a few weeks ago:“For Standard orders, you may notice on some occasions that only a Next Day ship method is available and you do not have the option to buy a slower one. In these instances you are temporarily permitted to buy shipping outside of the Buy Shipping tool, and may purchase tracked shipping labels directly from 3rd party carriers Royal Mail, DPD, Hermes, UK Mail, Parcel force or Yodel provided that you confirm dispatch and provide order tracking ID in Seller Central.”

I wasn’t sure how true this was, so I have created a case to the SFP support team, their reply was a bit wishy-washy and less specific than above, it just basically said if you don’t have offers on buy shipping then you can use 3rd party carriers and later give these order ID’s to amazon so they can annotate the account. Heard that hundreds of times and it doesn’t really answer my question on ‘standard’ orders. I will go back for a more detailed answer there.

So what I’m suggesting is, ignoring the offer of Tracked24 on buy shipping and instead buying a Tracked48 label directly from RM and upload the tracking details to amazon. Is anyone doing this?

I might be missing something here but you have to buy your shipping through ‘buy shipping’ in order to keep your SFP. If you purchase labels directly from Royal Mail, you will still meet customer and order expectations but you will probably lose your prime eligibility.

“Standard” orders are orders where the customer has not selected next-day delivery.
The paragraph quoted by the OP is referring to an occasional bug which can occur where a “standard” order doesn’t have ANY 48-hour shipping available through “buy shipping”, when this happens you may choose to ship that one specific order through any of: Royal Mail, DPD, Hermes, UK Mail, Parcel force or Yodel (note that you may not use Hermes if you’re still on the SFP trial).
again this only applies when there is a bug with the buy shipping options that are presented to you, it does NOT apply when only a specific courier is missing the 48 hour option for a standard order (even for couriers you’re not onboarded with)

MonkeyBoy:

Yes fellow Monkey, but SS have said that if you email performance team teh order id’s they would anotate your account, ie not include them in your defects. However, if i had a penny…

They annotate it so that a MANUAL review of your account will ignore them, but anything automated will still take them into account.

We once got suspended (fully, not just from SFP) when 30% of our SFP orders had a bug with buy shipping where only DPD was an option (we’re not onboarded with DPD), we got reinstated the moment a real person actually looked at our account.

We are onboarded with Amazon Shipping and Royal Mail. The problem I have is around 10-20% of orders, usually heavier items around 5-15kg will not get any offers from Amazon Shipping, forcing me to have to use RM tracked 24.

This is a problem for me, as my average weight used on my RM contract is higher than I’ve agreed.

I’m considering de-boarding with Royal Mail, so that when I have no offers from Amazon shipping outside this 84%, then I will have no offers at all, then I can then show amazon that the orders I don’t have an offer on resulted in buying externally. I’m not sure if this will work, any thoughts?

As I understand it, I’d just have to annotate to them weekly the order ID’s which I had to buy externally. I’d write a script for that so it would simplify the process.

This goes out to anybody else too, are you just using Amazon Shipping for SFP, what are you doing outside this 84%? Are they all being passed on to Royal Mail (collected by amazon)?

It could just be that orders over a certain weight are not getting passed on to RM from Amazon in these areas (Scotland, Devon, NI, etc).

As I understand it, I’d just have to annotate to them weekly the order ID’s which I had to buy externally. I’d write a script for that so it would simplify the process.

If there are absolutely no offers available when you try to use buy shipping then the order is automatically removed from this metric, you only need to contact them when an offer is available but is not suitable for some reason.

OK, the thing is I’m not sure I can really agree with what you’ve said there. I have some orders already that have no offers even though I’m onboarded with both Royal Mail and Amazon Logistics

These no offer orders, I’m using parcelforce to send currently, they are 100cm long boxes, weighing around 5kg, so are showing up in my metrics as bought outside ‘buy shipping’ and they seem to count against me.

Are you 100% sure? Or are we talking about a different scenario perhaps?

These no offer orders, I’m using parcelforce to send currently, they are 100cm long boxes, weighing around 5kg, so are showing up in my metrics as bought outside ‘buy shipping’ and they seem to count against me.

Are you 100% sure?

As long as you access the buy shipping screen to a point where it indicates that there are no offers, then you can ship with any courier without it affecting your metrics.
If it is giving you ANY offer, even a courier you can’t use, then you need to submit a case (and ideally remove that courier from your shipping settings to prevent it happening again).
If your metrics are still being affected then you should contacted seller support to find out why and don’t accept “you just need to submit a case” as an answer.

If you check my thread creation history you’ll see that we get affected by Amazon bugs more than the average seller, I’m currently fighting with Amazon over a particularly nasty bug with the SFP metrics, they keep turning off our prime badge because our on-time shipment rate is below 90%, but it’s actually 100% and has been 100% for the past 30+ days. They send us an email every Thursday (today included) asking why our on-time shipment rate is so low (maybe they want 110%?).
So the sooner you can nip the issue in the bud the better.

It can take the performance team 2-3 weeks in busy periods to remove the metric hit, while it only takes 5-10 days for them to suspend you for being under 98% buy shipping rate.

I’m thinking that you’ve hit the nail on the head here, so DPD does give us an offer, however we cannot use it as we are not onboard with them. I suspect this is the exact reason why these orders which have no offer from RM or AMZ are still showing up against us on our metrics. Which is crazy and yes I’d much rather not have to email them weekly with a list of order ID’s that have not received an offer, I’m busy enough as it is!

I’ve actually just emailed them prior to reading this reply from you, asking them to explain why these are showing against me despite no offer.

So can I ask, do you use DPD? If not, do you see offers from them? I’ve not heard of being able to make DPD disappear from the offers screen until now.

As for your problem with the on-time shipment, I’m assuming when you download your defects report there is no mention of them in there either?

Whenever we get any performance issues we get the same person emailing each time ‘Rishika’. She must be over worked dealing with all this on her own

So what I’m suggesting is, ignoring the offer of Tracked24 on buy shipping and instead buying a Tracked48 label directly from RM and upload the tracking details to amazon. Is anyone doing this?

I do this on all standard SFP orders and it doesn’t affect my metrics at all, i’m currently showing as 100% orders bought through buy shipping.
The SFP metrics only seem to apply to premium 1 or 2 day orders so all of these I use buy shipping and send RM Tracked 24, anything else goes RM Tracked 48.

The only downside that might occur is if a buyer claims none receipt of an order, I probably wouldn’t be eligible to win a Safe-T claim as the label wasn’t bought via Amazon.

It makes a mockery really by Amazon taking the RM Tracked 48 option away on Buy Shipping, only for them to technically allow us to get these RM tracked 48 labels outside of buy shipping.

Can I ask though, are you only onboard with RM or do you have a amazon shipping also?

I’m wondering what would happen if Amazon Shipping give me a ‘Amazon Shipping Standard Tracked’ offer on a Standard order alongside a RM Tracked 24 offer? I now understand I can ignore the Tracked24 if it’s standard, but do I have to accept this ‘Amazon Shipping Standard Tracked’ offer from Amazon or can I still buy externally would you think and of course get away with any negative metric mark?

I’m only onboarded with Royal Mail so I can’t say what would happen with an Amazon shipping offer.

If you look at your SFP metrics it shows how many orders used buy shipping in the last 7 days etc. Compare that figure with how many orders were received for standard and premium, if you can find a match those are the orders that would affect your metrics.

I’ve not heard of being able to make DPD disappear from the offers screen until now.

Settings -> buy delivery preferences -> select edit next to “preferences for your address here”
Remove DPD from the list on the left.

Crusader:

As for your problem with the on-time shipment, I’m assuming when you download your defects report there is no mention of them in there either?

There are several orders which indicate they have a late despatch defect BUT the despatch date indicated is within the expected despatch date, the “ship confirm date” (date the tracking was uploaded) indicates it was late BUT this is impossible since buy shipping automatically uploads the tracking. And the first scan date is on time…

Ah I know that screen and it doesn’t have DPD on the left, i have Amazon as #1 and RM #2 in orange rectangles.

On the right in grey I have China Post and DPD with 2 empty slots after that.

I took this matter up with SFP performance, they somehow claim I’m onboarded with DPD and that if I want they can attempt to ask the onboarding team to unlink us from DPD.

I’m sceptical if the support guy actually knows what he’s even talking about, but I’ll give them a chance and have since gone back and asked them to unlink us from DPD. Lets see what they come back with in the next couple of days.